President Obama says “raising standards” and the level of competition in American schools is the goal of his Race to the Top initiative. But behind the scenes, his Education Department is trying to lower standards to push one race to the top at the expense of others.

“Race to the Top has helped drive states nationwide to pursue higher standards,” the White House says, citing “development of rigorous standards and better assessments” as a “key” area of school reform.

Only, it doesn’t like the standards and tests used by schools to enroll overachieving students in gifted-and-talented and college-prep classes. It views them as discriminatory, simply because blacks and Latinos are “under-represented” in these so-called enrichment programs.

So, district by district, school by school, the administration is attacking the standards behind academic “tracking” or “ability grouping” as biased against chiefly African-American students. To measure academic success, it wants to substitute racial yardsticks for objective standards.

To that end, it’s investigating schools for discrimination to pressure them to soften these standards, while tying Race to the Top and other federal funding to desired reforms, which include changing diagnostic methods and testing to make selection into such programs more “equitable.”

The federal effort mirrors what’s happening in New York City, where the City Council wants to water down the test needed to get into elite high schools such as Stuyvesant and Bronx Science in the name of “fairness.”

The race-based crusade is just getting started: The Education Department is creating a discrimination database to target every public school in the nation that shows “disparities” in academic tracking by student race.

According to a notice recently posted in the Federal Register, the department will require all districts receiving federal funding to report “the number of students enrolled in gifted-and-talented programs (disaggregated by race)” and the “number of students enrolled in at least one AP course (disaggregated by race).” It will also mandate disclosure of the number of minority high schoolers who pass AP exams versus their white peers.

Schools that show blacks and Latinos under-enrolled in such curricula, to an undefined “statistically significant degree,” could open themselves up to investigation and lawsuits by the Education Department’s civil-rights office, which has already forced several school districts under investigation to revise their policies, including:

* White Plains Public School District, which has agreed to “expand its eligibility and selection criteria” for enrollment in its elementary school gifted-and-talented program, middle-school advanced courses and high-school honors and AP courses.

“It will specifically consider whether a modest modification of such criteria (i.e., lowering or raising test cutoff scores or performance indicators, or slightly altering the teacher-differentiation rating standards) will result in an increase of participation by African-American, Hispanic and ELL (English language learners) students,” according to a 10-page federal document signed last year by the school superintendent.

* Alabama’s Lee County School District, which was ordered last year to implement “alternative criteria” for AP and gifted-program enrollment, such as “an excellent attendance record,” to help African-Americans qualify for such programs.

* Los Angeles Unified School District, which has agreed to resolve a 2011 civil-rights probe by agreeing to develop “new constructs of giftedness that are multi-faceted (and) multi-cultural” in order to address “the achievement gap for African-American students.”

In all these cases, Obama’s educrats describe the traditional evaluations schools use to place students in accelerated classes as discriminatory “barriers” that “exclude” minorities from higher-level learning.

However, the standards are evenly applied across all races. The same assessment tests are administered for all pupils.

And for all its lawsuits and investigations, the Education Department has produced no evidence that any district (all of whom deny wrongdoing) was discriminating against minority students whose qualifications were similar to those of white and Asian students who make up the majority of enrollees in higher-level learning programs.

In fact, if these programs discriminate against blacks and Latinos, they also discriminate against whites, because federal statistics show that Asian students are over-represented in all of them, even more so than whites. In LAUSD, for example, 30% of Asian students were in gifted programs versus 25% of whites.

Data show that inequalities in high-level course taking for African-Americans is not a function of racism, but performance.

In the 2011-2012 school year, the latest available data, blacks made up 9% of students taking at least one AP class, but only 4% of those passing the AP exam. By comparison, whites accounted for 59% of AP enrollees and 67% of those passing the exam, while Asians made up 10% of enrollees and 13% of passers.

What’s more, 12% of black ninth graders were held back in that school year, compared with 4% of whites and 2% of Asians.

The Education Department resolutions tacitly acknowledge that academic readiness is the real reason for disparities. They require that districts provide tutoring and other support for minorities enrolling in AP courses and even mandate that they waive penalties for underperformance in these harder, college-level classes.

Dumbing down standards won’t better prepare them for college; it will only hurt all students.
Paul Sperry is a Hoover Institution media fellow and author of “The Great American Bank Robbery,” which exposes the racial politics behind the mortgage crisis.